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by chr1 754 days ago
Since you are exactly the molecular machine, nothing more and nothing less, saying "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it" is same as saying "the initial state of my self made me do it". So it does not mean that you should not be accountable, on the contrary it means that the action was caused by your essence, what makes you you, and not some outside entity or random chance.

As for the free will, it means that the behavior of a molecular machine depends on machine itself, not on far away stars or a random number generator. One can't say that he got unlucky initial state, because he _is_ that unlucky state. Any change of the state would create someone entirely different. Moreover Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility principle implies that despite all the information being contained in initial state, only way to extract predictions from that state is to run the molecular machine and observe its behavior.